Country profile/Portugal: As Portugal prepares for the Euro 2004 football championship, which will attract up to 500,000 visitors to the country in June, the opposition Socialist Party has seized on soccer as the dominant theme for its European election campaign posters.
Billboards show a referee holding up a yellow card to the Prime Minister, Mr José Manuel Durão Barroso, blaming his government for the recession that has buffeted the economy, bringing with it increased unemployment and plummeting consumer confidence.
The government coalition of Social Democrats (PSD) and the small, conservative Popular Party (CDS-PP) has responded with posters of a referee holding up a red card to the Socialists. It charges them with burdening the country with a soaring budget deficit by losing control of public finances when in government from 1995 to 2002.
Portugal's media pundits deride the football motif as predictable and formulaic. But the posters adequately sum up a campaign that is almost entirely focused on domestic political issues, particularly the question of who is most to blame for Portugal's deep recession.
In 2003 gross domestic product growth fell 1.3 per cent, more than in any other EU country, and unemployment hit a six-year high of 6.4 per cent.
Mr António Sousa Franco, a finance minister in the previous government and the main Socialist candidate, accuses the government of exacerbating the recession by imposing spending cuts to bring down the budget deficit and comply with the EU's Growth and Stability Pact.
Mr João de Deus Pinheiro, a former foreign minister, European commissioner and the leading candidate for the government coalition, describes Mr Sousa Franco as "the father of the deficit", attributing economic ills to overspending by the previous Socialist government.
In 1999 Portugal elected 25 MEPs. But following rearrangements resulting from the enlargement of the EU to 25 countries, it will elect only 24 in June.
The Socialists, who won 12 seats in 1999, enjoy a slight lead in opinion polls, reflecting voter dissatisfaction with the economy and, to lesser degree, opposition to the government's support for the US-led coalition in Iraq.
The two parties that serve in the government coalition are also running together in the European poll in an alliance called Força Portugal (Onward Portugal). In 1999 they ran separately, with the PSD winning nine seats and the Popular Party two. The other two seats went to the old-guard Communist Party (PCP).
Politicians fear a low turnout. Polls forecast only 30 per cent of the electorate will bother to vote, a drastic drop from 72 per cent when the country first voted in a European ballot in 1987.